Answering Questions About Pre-Code and “Complicated Women”

The great Miriam Hopkins, flanked by Fredric March and Gary Cooper, in DESIGN FOR LIVING (1933), about three people who decide that a menage a trois is the way they want to go through life.

I just read a review by Jennifer Garlen of Virtual Virago of my 2000 book, COMPLICATED WOMEN, and in it she asks some questions. I figure I’ll go ahead and answer them here:

“Reading the book in 2014, it’s hard not to wonder what LaSalle thinks has changed since Complicated Women was first published. Pre-Code movies have become much easier to watch with the advent of streaming and specialized services and television channels. Has Shearer’s reputation risen with the success of Turner Classic Movies and the arrival of Warner Archive and Warner Archive Instant? Have the movies finally caught up with Pre-Code visions of women’s sexual and professional lives? While LaSalle did publish a follow-up, Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man, in 2002, he hasn’t produced another book since then.”

1) At the point that I started looking for publishers in 1994, no one took Norma Shearer seriously, and no one thought of her as a pre-Code actress. Even I didn’t know that she was a pre-Code pioneer until earlier that year. I had avoided Shearer’s movies, because I’d read in so many places that she was a milquetoast. But I was very familiar with pre-Code films. So I was in an ideal position, when seeing the Shearer movies, to know what I was looking at. I very quickly saw that she was on the cutting edge in the early 1930s, and the research confirmed that everyone at the time knew it.

My great frustration in those four and half years it took to get my book proposal accepted was knowing the truth and being unable to get it out. I’d see masterpieces like LADY OF THE NIGHT and know that nobody had seen the film in 70 years. I’d go to the library and read what other writers were saying about Shearer, and I’d see inaccuracies and borderline slander. Also, as the process went on, I became passionate about other pre-Code women, such as Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis and Ann Harding, that no one seemed to care about. And I became convinced that other still-famous actresses, such as Loretta Young and Barbara Stanwyck, were never better than in the pre-Code days.

I don’t think there’s any question that Shearer’s stature has risen in the years since the book came out, and that the emphasis of people is now on her pre-Code work rather than on the queenly performances of her later years. Really, no wonder people didn’t like her when they only knew her from ROMEO AND JULIET. I think the book and the documentary had something to do with the critical resurgence. But availability of her films certainly didn’t hurt, either. The myth could only be maintained in the absence of evidence.

2) Our current cinema hasn’t caught up with the pre-Code days, because in the pre-Code days women were the biggest stars. The top six box office stars of 1932 were women. There aren’t any women in the top ten these days and haven’t been for many years. Americans make about 400 films every year, and of those only 25 or so star women — and that counts romantic comedies in which men and women are double billed as stars. Otherwise, women play the hero’s wife or girlfriend and get a couple of good scenes.

3) I did write another book. Actually, all I do is write other books, but they don’t always see the light of day, but one did: The Beauty of the Real: What Hollywood Can Learn from Contemporary French Actresses. It came out in 2012 and is a little like Complicated Women, except that nobody was dead, so if I had a question, I didn’t have to infer the answer. I just asked the actress. I also hope to have another book out soon, but more on that when it’s definite.

As far as writing another book about pre-Code goes, I’ve said everything I need to say. If I could, though, I wish I could add another 10,000 words to CW, just because I had to write it quickly, in six months, and because St. Martin’s specified a manuscript of about 65,000 words. I didn’t know — it was my first book — that if they say 65,000 that means don’t go over 75,000. I thought 65,000 was a cut off, as in a newspaper. A lot of what reviewers praised as the breeziness of the writing had to do with its being written in haste and with the need to be concise.